Impasse
by BlackxRose19
Summary: No matter who she is, no matter where she goes, Paris is always just out of reach. Elizabeth-centric.


**A/N**: Hello! This is my first adventure into writing Bioshock.

I played Burial at Sea: Part 2 last weekend and it gave me all the feels, and thus, this was born.

Therefore, this contains fairly mild spoilers for Burial at Sea: Part 2.

Also, this little one-shot is from the perspectives of Elizabeth (from Infinite), Anna, and Elizabeth (from Burial at Sea), in that order. Just so there's no confusion.

Enjoy!

* * *

The unattainability of Paris remains the one constant in her life.

The manner of the distance varies. The distance does not.

x

Sometimes she is Elizabeth. Elizabeth Comstock, daughter of the prophet, lamb of Columbia.

She answers to them all. She answers to _none. _

She doubts that any of the people in the city below actually know her name. To them, she is the illusive daughter of the man they know to be their savior, the daughter who exists only in the shining angel monument that looms over their day-to-day life. She's the one, they are told, who will one day save them _(like her father before her),_ yet they content themselves with never laying eyes on their would-be savior.

_Monument Island is off-limits to all civilians._ This they know, and this they do not question.

In this world, Elizabeth's world, Paris is a pipe-dream, a place she reads about in a book one day when the Songbird is busy patrolling the skies and Madame Lutece is done prodding her and poking her and testing her powers. Paris is a promise, a promise of dreams, people, wide-open streets so unlike her stuffy tower, a shining allure that is so powerful that it doesn't matter that she has no idea _how_ to get there.

She resolves to do it, no matter what.

She paints Paris, she reads about Paris, she dreams about Paris. She pictures herself, pretty and happy, walking arm in arm with someone who loves her, someone who cares about her, someone who doesn't lock her in a tower and content himself with visiting her only when it serves his own needs.

When she concentrates hard enough, sometimes, she opens up a tear. It's shaky and rough and she can never quite _go_ there, can never walk the streets of the city and smell the flowers along the river, can never actually speak to the people who wave as she walks by, but it's more than she can hope for. Sometimes she snags a little piece of Paris and brings it to her tower. A flower, a book, a stone from the cobbled streets.

_Wish fulfillment, right?_

It's not quite the same as actually _going there_, but it's pretty close. It may be as close as she'll ever get.

And then he arrives.

x

"_You have a child?"_

"…_no."_

x

In one life, she is Anna. She is Anna and she has her pinky, she has her father, she sees the world as it is now, as it exists in her own little apartment in New York.

No doors, no sea of lighthouses, no infinite possibilities.

Her father is her father. He is Booker DeWitt. Father. Private investigator. Drunk.

Her mother has been gone since she was born, one leaving the world as the other came in to it, and Booker doesn't talk about her, won't talk about her, can't talk about her, _I don't want to talk about this right now, Anna._

His face gets sad and his eyes get distant and his grip on the bottle gets a little too tight and now she knows to leave well enough alone.

His life before her mother, that's another thing to let lie, because the same dull, crumpled, vacant look falls over his features when she fishes a paper out of his desk, asks, _Daddy, is this yours? What's Pinkerton?_ and he grabs it from her hand, tucks it in his pocket, and the look her gives her lets her knows that there are just some things he keeps buried in the corners of his mind, things that need to _stay where they are._

{Sometimes, little Anna dreams of a city in the sky and a metal bird that swoops down and clutches her in its claws, screeching _Elizabeth, Elizabeth,_ until she wakes up screaming and thrashing and already crying.}

{Anna has secrets, too.}

Their life is small and it is cramped, existing solely between the four walls of the one-bedroom apartment that doubles as Booker's office. He works at his desk, sleeps at it as well, and Anna often wakes in the morning to find her father gone, off on some investigation, off to gamble away his paycheck.

It's easier if she doesn't know which one.

At night, Booker holds her close and tells her a bedtime story and it doesn't matter that she's heard it fifty times, or that sometimes he forgets her favorite part, or that he usually falls asleep before he gets to the end, because he holds her close and he doesn't let her go and even when he's gone in the morning, she knows he'll come back.

In this life, she's closest to Paris.

It's close, but it's not enough.

x

"_Who's Anna?"_

x

She doesn't remember this place.

_This_ Paris is contrived, a too-perfect nightmare, and there's Seurat and there's the Eiffel Tower, things that have never existed together melding before her eyes, and _no, no, no, this is wrong, this shouldn't be here._

_Where are you, Booker?_

She doesn't remember getting here, doesn't remember anything before the moment at the café, before the man showing her a picture of her own face, and _When did I ever look like that? I don't. Where is my necklace? Where is Booker? He said he'd come with me._

Everyone is clapping and laughing and dancing, their voices and feet and hands forming an ear-splitting cacophony and a bird lands on her finger and sings and the whole thing would be so amusing if she weren't so _terrified._

A red balloon bobs above the crowd. Sally is there and then she is gone.

This is not her Paris either, this dark, empty nightmare. Everyone is gone, the streets are empty, a flash of lightning illuminates an angel, _her angel_, her _prison,_ and the roll of thunder sounds too much like Songbird, too much like the metal death screech of her captor, and she runs, runs into the dark.

Sally is there, too. She is too pale, too thin, wide, glowing eyes set in a hollow, sunken face, and she screams and multiplies and has just enough time to blame _everything_ on Elizabeth before she bursts into a thousand different infernos.

And Elizabeth is back. This is not Paris. This is not even Columbia. This is Rapture.

She is dead. She is normal. She is alone.

Paris has never seemed further away.

x

"_I never should've left…"_

x

She imagines, for the longest time, that Paris will exist as nothing more than a poster on her wall, always close enough to see and too far away to touch. She contents herself with the tears, with whatever insincere impression that is within her power to create.

And then Booker, quite literally, falls into her life.

He is rough and gruff, funny in an irony-laced, self-deprecating way. There's something familiar in his face, something familiar and frightening and comforting all at once, and she doesn't know why, but she trusts him almost immediately. He calls her "Miss" at first, "Miss Elizabeth" later, as if he owes her any sort of favors and respect by refusing to drop the honorific.

He brings her freedom, he brings her a chance to put to use all the things she's read in books over the years.

Most importantly, he brings her hope, a hope that Paris can be something that exists outside of dreams, outside of the universes that she rips open in the confines of her bedroom.

It's a lie, of course. The first time. His promise of Paris is nothing more than a device to get her to do what he wants. She doesn't know why, and she doesn't ask. She sees it in the look on his face when she asks about his wife. _Don't go there. Don't do this. It's none of your business._

She's used to being lied to so those above her can get their way. Booker is no different to her than a stranger on the street, so she has no idea _why_ this betrayal hurts so much, why she takes that wrench to his head, why she runs and runs, and why she feels _so_ glad that he keeps chasing her and won't let her get away.

{But that's not quite true, is it? He's no stranger and you know it and maybe that's what hurts.}

The second time he promises to take her to Paris, it's the truth. He's tired of it all, the running and the Prophet and Columbia in general, and his face is just so earnest, so sincere, _so old_ beyond his years in that moment, that she agrees. After they take care of Comstock.

Comstock, and then Paris. That's how the plan should go.

It goes like this:

A fight, a city under the sea, an endless vast expanse of lighthouses and doors and the _truth_, Booker is a friend, a savior, a companion, _a father, _a father who gave up in a moment of weakness and spent nineteen years trying to fix his mistakes.

She is Anna, Anna Dewitt in some other world, and as she holds him under the water, watches him breathe his last breath, Elizabeth ceases to exist.

In the years that follow, she waits and hopes that in some universe, there is some Elizabeth that gets to Paris.

Because she definitely won't.

x

"_I don't understand."_

"_We don't need to, it'll happen all the same."_

x

The results don't change when her name is different. Anna never gets to Paris either.

For Anna, Paris exists in the books she reads in the library. She reads history, she studies pictures, she spends weeks speaking in nothing but broken French, pointing at things, a spoon, a dog, her father, trying to get the language down.

_Maybe someday, child,_ Booker laughs, and she smiles and dreams of cobbled streets and blooming flowers.

But Booker drinks until the liquor runs out, spends all the money to buy more, and gambles all his time away to get more money. It's a vicious cycle, one that goes on and on and on, over and over, and Booker swears up and down, up and down, _this is the last time, the last time._

One day, Anna wakes up. She is nineteen and the dream isn't any closer.

Paris is still just a book on her shelf, just a drawing in her sketchbook, and though Booker never says it, he looks at her and she knows it's never going to happen.

_Maybe someday,_ he says again, but his grip is tight around the neck of a bottle and his eyes are blurry and when he looks at her, it's like he isn't sure who she is.

There is no "someday". It never comes and Paris is always just a book, just a picture, just a dream. Booker becomes a ghost, a whisper, a shadow in his own apartment.

When she finally leaves, he holds her like he'll never let her go. She closes her eyes and thinks of her long-gone nightmares, of the great metal bird, of the city in the clouds, of Elizabeth.

She wonders if Elizabeth has ever been to Paris.

x

"_I think…Booker would miss you."_

x

She isn't sure who she is anymore. Elizabeth? Anna? And then what? Is she a Comstock or a Dewitt?

She answers to one, refers to herself by another. She is neither, she is both. She is herself, and yet she is no one. She's just a girl now, a normal girl, no tears, no doors, no infinite universes.

There was once a time she thought she would've loved to be just like everyone else. Now, it's a curse. It means she's stuck. It means she'll never see Booker again.

So she conjures up some amalgamation of him. He talks like her Booker, looks like her Booker, and insists that he's not. He never lets her forget that he is nothing more than a fabrication of her sad, sick mind, _denial, denial, denial,_ to the point that she finds herself snapping at him, _Then…humor me!_

It was a mistake, to come here, to help Atlas, to get caught up in this web that she has no place in. _Didn't I do enough damage in Columbia?_

There is no Paris here, in the dark, sunken ruins of a city already past its prime, and after a while, Booker goes too, and then she is truly alone.

_You were my only friend, _she finds herself breathing to the dark, to the nothingness, to the deaf ears that cannot hear the desperation creeping into her voice. _My only friend._

It's almost welcoming, the sharp pain that the wrench sends through her skull, and she'd laugh if it weren't so horrible, a wrench, _of all things_, the very thing she had hit Booker with so long ago, long ago when she realized, for the first of many times, that Paris would never be hers.

Sally takes her hand in her last moment, smiles, and doesn't sunburst into a million flaming cinders before her eyes, not like the last time. Elizabeth lets herself imagine Sally's blonde hair brown just for a fraction of a minute and hopes that somewhere, in one of these infinite possibilities, Anna has found what she could not.

She hopes Anna has found Paris.

x

_Send me photographs and souvenirs  
_

x

She gets there, at the end of all things. Not Anna, but Elizabeth. The girl she has always been.

She finds_ him_ there too, and he takes her hand, and together they walk across the bridge, along the riverbank, down the streets lined with flowers. They walk off into the infinite.

She gets to Paris, and for once, it's not a dream. It's not a nightmare. It's not a picture in a book.

It's taken longer than she had hoped and it's cost her more than she imagined.

But she gets there in the end.

Somehow, it's enough.

* * *

**A/N:** Thank you for reading. :)


End file.
